He'll Just Chute And Shoot

Wild Westhead Is Back In Race

August 07, 1993|By Skip Myslenski, Tribune NCAA Basketball Writer.

Six parachutes were the first items Paul Westhead requested. He is the seeker of speed, you recall; the merchant of inflated scoring totals, the coach who once unleashed a Loyola Marymount team that ran up a Division I record of 186 points in a single game.

College basketball's old 45-second clock? "The four-to-five second clock" is what Westhead used to call it.

"We want to flirt with speeds no one else has reached," he said of his team's goal back then.

"I guess somewhere along the line I took a left-hand turn, and now I'm just staying left and trying to circle everybody," he had described himself.

Westhead is the new coach at George Mason University, and when he met with school officials shortly after his hiring, he was asked, "What are some of the things you need to be successful?"

Oh, yes, Paul Westhead is back, crazy as ever. And just what that means to George Mason's neighbors in the Colonial Athletic Association (which includes James Madison's Lefty Driesell, another borderline crazy) can be gleaned with a look back at his Loyola Marymount days.

His Tigers produced a Division I record of 122.4 points a game in the 1989-90 season. They scored a record 149 points in defeating defending champion Michigan in the second round of the 1990 NCAA tourney. They hit a record 21 three-point shots in that same game. And a week later, while losing in the regional final to eventual NCAA champ Nevada-Las Vegas, they put up a record 41 three-point attempts.

Westhead's style failed miserably when he transported it to the NBA, where in two seasons his Denver Nuggets won only 44 games and lost 120. But now he's back, and the first opponent on his schedule is Division I newcomer Troy State.

That is the same Troy State that uses his system, that holds the Division II single-game scoring record of 259 points and the Division II season scoring record of 121.1 points per game.

"I figure," Westhead says in anticipation of that Nov. 27 night, "that about 223 points could win that one."

His eyes dance when he says that, for he has envisioned one of his teams going for 200 ever since he refashioned himself as the seeker of speed. It was back in the mid-'70s, when he was coaching at LaSalle, that Westhead settled on that guise and wedded himself to it so firmly that he figuratively taunted opponents into running with him.

In one game, his Explorers fell behind by six, and their opponent started to stall with seven minutes remaining in the first half. Westhead, wanting to end that nonsense, tempted the opponent to shoot by sending one of his players to the opposite end of the court. When that didn't work, he sent another down, and when even that didn't get the desired result, he directed a third to move away. Only then, with a three-man advantage, did that opponent shoot.

This attitude later accompanied him to the Lakers, who won the 1980 NBA title under him and then fired him in November of 1981 (the day after Magic Johnson publicly complained he was unhappy with Westhead's slow and patterned style). He next spent a trying season ('82-'83) with the Dark Age Bulls, then sat out for two years before resurfacing at Loyola Marymount.

It was there that he refined his scheme and enjoyed his most successful exposure with it, and not even his failure with the Nuggets would alter his belief in it.

"That," he says of his Denver experience, "was just another reminder you have to have good players to win. As good as, if not better than, your opponents.

"So, no, the offense doesn't need any tinkering. But I am always wondering how I can make it faster. Somehow shooting the ball in five seconds seems too long. I feel we should do it faster than that."

Is that why you came back?

"You know, you get caught up in wanting to be around the action," says Westhead, who didn't need the new 35-second clock to attract him. "I was thinking of finding a way to get my running game going again, and this was a vehicle to see if I could get my speed game started up in Virginia. I don't know what's going to happen, but I wanted to have a fling at 125 points a game."

Already, to prepare for their coach's fling, his players (who went 7-21 last year) are enduring his singular conditioning routines. They are running interval workouts associated mostly with milers. They are running in weighted vests, running through swimming pools-and running with those parachutes billowing out behind him.

Jim Gillen introduced Westhead to this particular twist when he took over as trainer for the Nuggets after assisting for years with the Denver Broncos. Parachutes strapped to your back add weight and provide resistance and demand the runner have perfect form.

And they really are doing that, insists Westhead, who has tried to explain his methods in meetings with his new players. "But," he says, "I haven't seen them play yet. That should be an experience."